I haven't really scoured the numbers for participation/conversion rate or anything, but my gut feeling is that CES is performing really well right now. I think it's made a top 16 appearance or better in nearly every event the last few weeks. Yet it still feels like a dark horse deck. It's kind of strange

Watched Jim Davis' stream the other day when he played CES, he went 5-0 and still said basically that the deck was neat, but it wasn't anything special. Even though he dominated everyone he played.

What more do you want him to say? He's been pretty clear about it, permission is not the decks weakness so teching against it is probably not necessary, especially if doing so effects your percentage in other match ups.

Nice updates! Thanks for putting the work in. I'm eagerly awaiting my paper orders so I can bring this to a game night this weekend. I'm still kind of surprised more people haven't picked up on this deck.

I think it depends more on what else is in your hand. If they cast a Bontu's and you don't have much gas they are going to see another 3-4 cards, at least, before you can regain board control, and a Shoal would probably put the game out of reach.

If you have mana to activate Relic than you don't need to worry about Goryo's, so leaving them with a Breach their only outs are Wurm or Griselbrand with one look. I'd probably take Bontu's

It's not about if a card gets reprinted, it's about how it gets reprinted. Well, it's not worth going on a tirade over modern prices because it's wizards game and they can play this however they want to. I find it interesting that some people who find modern too expensive have foiled out commander decks worth about a thousand dollars, but I got a feeling it's the fact that many decks are basically unplayable without a big initial investment that really makes this format hard to break into. Smaller, incremental payments have always been an easier way to get people to spend money than telling them they have to spend about 300 dollars on a single playset of a card to make a certain deck strategy work.

No one wants their Liliana of the Veil to be 5 dollars, and the vast majority of players don't want to pay 400 usd for a playset of her. Are people really so unwilling to say that maybe wizards should print a card so that it effectively drops to a happy medium, or have people fallen to the point that they basically are investors in everything but name now?

Yep, well said. This is what I was getting at with my earlier point on Legacy. With the exception of duel lands (cards that maintain value because of the reserved list), the price per card is actually lower than Modern for most decks. Why should the barrier of Modern be so high when it doesn't have the baggage of the reserved list? For whatever reason WotC wants to keep supply low for most Modern staples, and apparently, they think 1k~ USD for a deck is sustainable for a healthy format.

I'm not entirely sure why. I'd rather cheaper decks and more people to play with. If you want to invest in Magic cards (why!?) invest in the reserved list

It's arguable that without duel lands Legacy would actually be cheaper than Modern. The larger card pool creates more variety where fringy cards that aren't worth a lot can find a home in a deck. If you look on MTGoldfish at most of the Legacy decks they would be in the 500-800 range, if not less, if it wasn't for the duels. Compare that to something like Jund in Modern, and there's barely a card below 20 dollars.

Just something of note I've found interesting. It looks like despite the selective reprinting the price of buying into Modern is actually going up.